A few years ago, I traveled to Lapland to complete part of my doctoral studies. This journey marked an important period of reflection in my artistic practice. I arrived in the middle of winter, and natural light became a defining element of my daily life. I painted and wrote, considering my room a creative laboratory where different artistic processes unfolded continuously, evolving in dialogue with natural cycles. Paper became my constant companion, a portable material that accompanied me for five months.

I began drawing the shadows of the forest as they were reflected on the walls. On each sheet of paper, I recorded the exact time when those rays of light appeared, often lasting only an instant. Every day, for months, I repeated this process, observing how the intensity of the light, the contrasts, and the surface qualities of the materials gradually changed.

From this experience, several formats emerged: artist’s books compiling these pages, notebooks in which I observed nature and color within the room, and a camera obscura that I built after night had fallen.

Material poem

Lapland´s lights diary

At the beginning of spring, I also found a book on botany. Its images inspired me to create gardens on the papers I had transformed during the winter.

I also investigated variations in the colors of the landscape. Next to my bedroom window, I placed a scale to paint everyday scenes with those chromatic nuances, and I collected photographs at different times of day to explore the relationships between nature and color.

When spring arrived and the days dissolved the night, I assembled a camera obscura in my room. The outside seeped into the inside, as if I were immersed in a moving image—everything shifting, everything gently unfolding, inverted upon the wall.